Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for managing information in a database and more particularly to tiered processing of requests for information in a database.
EXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents are used to define information in a generic manner that can be read or otherwise utilized by different applications, systems, environments, etc. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined XML Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP) as a specification that allows a client to read, write and modify application data, such as configuration data, stored in XML format on a server. Generally speaking, XCAP maps XML document sub-trees and element attributes to HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), so that these components can be directly accessed by HTTP. XML Document Management (XDM) is an Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) specification for accessing and manipulating XML documents stored in networked document repositories. The XDM specification is based on XCAP and enables manipulation of individual XML elements and attributes instead of the whole XML document. This reduces the amount of bandwidth used to receive and respond to requests to access information in the XML documents. XDM enablers are provided as part of the OMA Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) SIP Instant Messaging Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) presence enabler and other OMA enablers as described in the Open Mobile Alliance specifications.
However, processing of XDM operations involve complete parsing of each document to apply the request. That is, upon receiving an XCAP request, an XDM server parses each XML document of a repository to search for a string identified in the XCAP request. As a result, XDM operations do not to scale very well. In other words, as the size of the repository grows and/or the number of requests increases, the processing load on the XDM server grows significantly. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for processing of XDM operation to access XML documents in a database or other repository.